National Science Foundation funding bill clears the House science committee.

Share this story

Last year around this time, the US House Science Committee was considering a bill that would force the National Science Foundation to reconsider its funding priorities. The Foundation has been tasked with funding basic research, but the bill would have directed it to only fund science deemed to be in the national interest—things like research with defense applications or with obvious economic outcomes.

Yesterday, the committee put the final touches on this year's version of the bill, and in a bit of good news, some of the more problematic language was gone. Although the current bill still wants the Foundation to perform "investment in strategic areas vital to the national interest," the actual funding requirements it stipulates provide the NSF with a broad leeway in interpreting the national interests. Grants can go to programs that aid in the "development of a STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] workforce and increased public scientific literacy" or the "promotion of the progress of science."

But the Committee still wants to be able to blame someone if a grant it doesn't like gets funded, as it added a requirement that an NSF official provide "written justification" for any grants that are awarded.

The bill also laid out the NSF's budget, setting funding priorities for different areas of research. When the bill was first announced, Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) had targeted some of the grants in the social sciences by claiming, “Unfortunately, NSF has misused taxpayer dollars and funded too many questionable research grants." Accordingly, the original bill chopped $50 million from the $250 million budget for social science research. But that wasn't enough for some members of the committee, as Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) tacked on an amendment that took another $50 million out of this area's budget.

The bill still has to pass the full House and Senate, so it's unclear how much of this language will survive. The continued focus on social science research and forcing the NSF to justify its grant decisions, however, provides some indication of how the people who are helping set science policy view the field.

Promoted Comments

I'd like to add one thing that seems to be missed often in the discussion of this bill. The division in the crosshairs most directly is the Social, Behavioral, and Economics Directorate. Great attention is given to the social psychology research in discussions, but I'd like to shed some light on other things handled by this section. I can't do it first-hand for economics (although I do thing that's probably in our national interest) but I can do it in another area - neuroscience.

Think it might be a good idea to understand how the brain works if we hope to be able to fix it in the case of damage or disease? Do you think it might be in our national interest, given the massive shift in demographics towards an older population that will suffer from memory disorders and other cognitive disorders, to understand how these things work in the brain? How about knowing what is leading some brains to be more susceptible to PTSD than others and what effect it might have on the brain? It's not easy to fix an incredibly complex system if you don't know how it works.

Well, all of cognitive neuroscience (e.g., those functional brain scans) falls under the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. That's in the direct line of fire and, according to the bill, deserving of a 26% cut.

Disclaimer: I'm a researcher who has been funded by NSF and the BCS division and currently have one grant under review. The prior grants have studied how the hippocampus functions and what computations it performs in the service of memory. These basic-science grants have led to others that are more "applied" as we study aging and early dementia with this as a backdrop.